The present invention relates to a laser recording process of high speed and high speed resolving power comprising deflecting a laser beam to a slight extent and dividing it into multi-beams, arranging said multi-beams with equal intervals in the direction of right angle with respect to the direction of the main deflection, and subjecting said multi-beams to the main deflection while modulating them.
In the process for laser recording of patterns such as Roman letters or numerals disclosed by Applicants in copending Application Ser. No. 594,126, filed July 8, 1975, the laser beam is slightly deflected in the direction of the height of the letters in case of lateral writing, by a deflection means such as an acoustic-optical element (hereinafter referred to as AO element) to produce seven to nine beam spots, which are then modulated, scanned and recorded. If in this case, for example, nine ultrasonic waves having different wave lengths are modulated by use of a letter pattern signal and then fed into an AO element successively, the nine kinds of ultrasonic waves resulting in the AO element form nine phase lattices, which allow the laser beam to be deflected in nine different directions successively. Subsequently, images are formed on a laser recording medium by an optical means. As a result, there are obtained nine laser spots which are arranged in the vertical direction.
If one wishes to effect a scanning by the above mentioned process, it is possible to elevate the scanning frequency to several hundred KHz so far as the number of resolution points is at most 7 to 9. However, it is generally true that an increased number of resolution points reduces the speed of scanning, so that for Chinese characters where the number of resolution points is as large as 32 or more, the scanning speed becomes impractically low. This is the disadvantage of this process as compared with other processes, for example, use of a cathode ray tube.
Nevertheless, the laser recording process is suitable for recording complicated patterns such as Chinese characters which requires a high resolving power, because the spot diameter of the formed image can be reduced in the laser recording process. It is intended in the present invention to utilize the above-mentioned merits of a laser recording process, namely the high resolving power, to realize a recording process of high speed as compared with the hitherto known processes, and thereby to provide a high speed laser recording process which can compete with other recording processes.